najam sethi

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Ali Chishti, who writes for The Friday Times, has gone public in
Islamabad with details of his abduction and beating last Friday, August 30.
Chishti is making the rounds of TV talk shows describing how he was picked up
in Karachi by uniformed police driving a police vehicle, blindfolded, switched
to another police vehicle, taken to a small room somewhere in Karachi, and
beaten by men he does not think were police officers. After nine hours, he was
dropped by the side of the road at 4:30 Saturday morning.

Introduction

By Bob Dietz

At least 42 journalists have been killed—23 of them murdered—in direct relation to their work in Pakistan in the past decade, CPJ research shows. Not one murder since 2003 has been solved, not a single conviction won. Despite repeated demands from Pakistani and international journalist organizations, not one of these crimes has even been put to a credible trial.

1. The Murder of Wali Khan Babar

On January 13, 2011, Wali Khan Babar, a 28-year-old correspondent for Geo TV, was driving home after covering another day of gang violence in Karachi. Babar was an unusual face on the airwaves: Popular and handsome, he was a Pashtun from Zhob in Baluchistan near the border with Afghanistan. For Geo, it was a rare boon to have a Pashtun in Karachi, and so the station planned to send him abroad for training to become an anchor.

3. Intimidation, Manipulation, and Retribution

A couple of years ago, Hamid Mir, Najam Sethi, Umar Cheema, and other prominent figures in the news media began going public with the threats they were receiving from intelligence agencies. It was a risky calculation, but the silence, they reasoned, encouraged intimidation and allowed impunity to persist.

Conclusion

The murder of Saleem Shahzad in May 2011 galvanized journalists across Pakistan in a way that few other events have. For a short time their power as a “union” was felt. They secured a commission of inquiry. They named ISI officers who had threatened Shahzad and many other journalists. They detailed those encounters in a public record available on the Internet. The resulting report offers a series of promising recommendations, saying in part:

The Friday Times
in Lahore has come under cyberattack. Earlier Friday, its website could not be accessed.

Najam Sethi,
the paper's editor, told CPJ that someone has "launched an attack on the
websites of both The Friday Times and
Vanguard Books [the book publishing
and distribution company that owns the Times].
A tsunami of killer spams and log-ins have clogged the sites and blocked them."